


Watson's Woes 2020 Monthly Prompts

by gardnerhill



Series: Watson's Woes Monthly Prompts [3]
Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Community: watsons_woes, Drabble, Gen, Movie: A Game of Shadows, Prompt Fic, Story: The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, Story: The Final Problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 12:14:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22969819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: Not all cavalry ride horses.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Series: Watson's Woes Monthly Prompts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1245440
Comments: 72
Kudos: 57





	1. Armada

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all cavalry ride horses.

Holmes was bound and blindfolded, lying in the bilge of a barge making its way down the Thames, but he marked their progress nevertheless. The three men who'd caught him were steering toward a particular dockyard that was likely the temporary headquarters of the man whose name he did not know yet (and whom he called The Professor). Interrogation, no doubt; he was in for a ghastly time. But Wiggins was safe, and so was Watson – Holmes had sent his friend away with their guide and diverted their three pursuers to follow him alone, fleeing through the maze of the dockside alleyways – and that was a surprisingly solid comfort. No doubt Watson would contact Lestrade but by the time the police had mobilised Holmes would be undergoing round two at the fists of The Professor's henchmen. Scotland Yard's finest might arrive in time to fish his corpse from the Thames–

Thumps and yells of pain outside interrupted his thoughts. The solid thuds of something hard hitting the wooden sides of the barge – rocks, big ones.

The bruiser standing watch in the bilge, most likely armed, uttered an exclamation, his voice indicating that he'd turned his body away from Holmes toward the outside – and Holmes took advantage of the distraction to lash out with his bound ankles. A solid hard-and-soft connection, a yell, and a clatter of the gun hitting the wall (thumb and forefinger broken). Another calculation of body height, another bound-ankle kick lower down, and the crunch of the knee was drowned out by the man's screaming as he collapsed. Holmes was already sitting up and emulating Houdini as fast as he could.

Other yells from outside – boys, including Wiggins, coming from all around the barge, and led by the baritone bellow of his soldier.

He freed himself from his restraints, yanked off the blindfold and staggered to the hatchway. "Watson!" he shouted.

"Hold your fire!" Watson roared.

Holmes pulled himself out of the hatch as the thuds stopped, and was greeted with a cheer as he emerged into the daylight.

The barge was surrounded by every kind of small craft – rafts, rowboats, bundles of logs, fishing-boats, gigs – and each one had a boy in it, about Wiggins' age (Wiggins himself in pride of place aboard a neat little two-man rowboat). Watson was on the barge deck, trussing the battered pilot who was the only man still upright; the other two were laid flat, bloodied and bruised. Stones littered the deck, and grinning boys clutched more of them in their fists as they waved and cheered.

"I could have gone to the police," Watson said, still focused on binding the barge-pilot, "and next day I'd still be at the station waiting for them to take action. Sometimes you have to liberate a few horses and just go at them."

"Or a fleet of boats, in this case." Holmes straightened and snapped off a salute to Wiggins, eliciting more cheers and waved caps from the Irregulars. "Well done, Admiral Watson."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the February 2020 Watson's Woes Monthly Prompt, “fleet"


	2. Illustrative

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things are priceless.

"How old was that jug we retrieved from Baron Gruner?" 

Watson rolled his eyes. "That _jar_ was Sui Dynasty. Twelve centuries old. Priceless."

Holmes returned his attention to Mary. "The point is that we found it." 

"And broke it." Watson looked at Holmes. "You broke it." 

"More accurate to say that I let go and it fell to its natural death." 

Watson smirked. "The Chinese ambassador was not happy." 

Holmes held up a finger. "We did give him every shard of that antiquity. Their museum people would know how to reassemble that bit of pottery. No longer priceless, true, but no longer held by a murderous thief either." 

Mary Morstan had not been this close to Sherlock Holmes throughout her courtship for nothing. She noted the lack of actual rancor in John's responses, Sherlock's indifferent delivery of what should have been a shocking loss to an art-lover. All of this banter, bound back and forth with that invisible skein that held the two men together. 

Her own deduction was the work of seconds. "Sherlock must have dropped the vase to stop someone from killing John, most likely this vile Baron." 

Both men gaped at the Watson-in-prospect. Then they looked at each other. 

That was the moment Mary knew that Sherlock, for all his petulance and fear, would give John his blessing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the March 2020 Watson's Woes Monthly Prompt, “antiquity"


	3. Much to Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes hope is a small yellow thing.

The influenza epidemic took its toll on every household, including ones where no one was ill. 

The domicile on Baker Street was no different. Dr. Watson had been coming home later and later, silent with what he'd seen and had been unable to stop. Because Holmes was his friend, he said nothing; perhaps his experiments were not as malodourous and his violin tunes sweeter to lull the man into the sleep of dead exhaustion. 

Week after week of winter weather, week after week of 'flu. Dreary weather outside; utter solitude or silent distress at the grey and dreary man who joined him inside. 

One night he looked up from the papers as Watson walked in. Still bowed with exhaustion; face still haunted. But there was something different in that expression tonight, something … easier. 

"What happened?" 

Half a smile curled half of the moustache. This was one of the times when Holmes' instant ability to read people in general and Watson in particular was a blessed timesaver rather than an annoyance. "I saw a daffodil on the way home." 

Ah. One of the first flowers to show its face every year. A reminder that winter, like the illness, would pass away in time; that the days would soon grow warmer and longer.

"What a lovely thing." Holmes took up his bow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the April 2020 Watson's Woes Monthly Prompt, “daffodil."


	4. Vet (May Drabble #1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course he'd have done this.

Naturally he threw all his faculties into the job of vetting the woman who had captured Watson's heart. 

Of course he was able to deduce plenty from her appearance and her story, but regular plodding research also aided in his work to investigate Mary Morstan. 

Daughter of an Army officer, well-matched to a former soldier. Possessed of the quiet command required of a governess that would also appeal to Watson. Even-tempered, a mellowing factor for an occasionally hot-tempered man. Level-headed and intelligent; no meek compliant maiden but an able helpmate. 

It was as he'd feared: She was perfect for him.


	5. The Help (May Drabble #2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's more to keeping 221b than blacking the stove.

"It says that you help your mother tend house. A sterling reference from the mother superior at your school as well." The woman looked up from the paper. 

Bridgid kept herself solemn. She needed to assist her mam and 10 brothers and sisters by getting a paying job. 

"Can you handle a revolver?"

The 15-year-old blinked. "Beg pardon, Mrs. Hudson?"

"Mr. Holmes sometimes has unsavoury visitors." The older woman smiled. "But he'll never lay a hand on you." 

For half a pound a week? 

"I'll learn fast enough, ma'am." 

Hudson smiled; that was clearly the right answer. "You'll start today."


	6. Another Man's Eyesore (May Drabble Prompt #3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It'll never catch on.

"Ghastly." 

Watson turned and gave Holmes a stare. "Really." 

"Absolutely." Holmes kept his eyes on the item they were both viewing, looking like a bird transfixed by a snake. 

"So it's not a triumph of modern architecture? Not a monument to man's mastery over his environment in these modern times?"

"It's a vulgar modern addition to an area with centuries of history. It looks like building scaffolding. The Champs Elysees will never be the same." Holmes finally turned his back on Gustave Eiffel's creation. "I fear that this monstrosity will be what people think of first when they picture Paris."


	7. Petrichor (May Drabble Prompt #4)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The oddest things conjure up the memory of home.

A violent pummeling by freezing alpine sleet he took in stride. 

Frigid air as he fled into Florence was only to be expected. 

He trudged through the blistering sun that beat down on his covered head in Khartoum. 

The wind shrieking around his Lhasa mountain path he leaned into, stone-faced.

The _sirocco_ wind whipping sand into his face outside Mecca he bore without a sound. 

But when a spring rain fell on Parisian boulevards, and the macadam eddied redolent with the scent of water on warm stone, that the memory of London pierced his eyes; and he wept for homesickness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the 2020 Watson's Woes Merry Month of May Drabbles Week 4 Prompt: rain


	8. China Shop (May Drabbles #5)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Never run from anything immortal; it attracts their attention." – Peter S. Beagle

Good news: Holmes and Watson had located the poachers' steamship. 

Bad news: They'd discovered – literally by walking in on it – that the poachers also trafficked in _live_ animals, for the wealthy who wanted a big-game hunt without inconvenient subcontinental travel. 

Instead of ivory the hold contained twelve enormous snorting African Cape buffaloes and two consulting detectives. Watson's terrified expression indicated just how dangerous they were. 

"Easy-peasy," Holmes murmured. He moved through the beasts in an amble. "Don't be threatening. You're a stork, sharing the watering-hole."

Step by agonizingly-slow step, eyes averted, the two men sauntered out of the lion's den.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the 2020 Watson's Woes Merry Month of May Drabbles Week 5 Prompt: _amble_


	9. Ambience (September 2020)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a certain piquance about the establishment.

Watson told himself, repeatedly, that he accompanied Holmes to his bouts in the Punchbowl to keep a medical eye on his mercurial flatmate. That he entered the festering pit that teemed with the unwashed worst of English manhood (grimy stevedores and over-perfumed aristocratic boys alike) whooping and cheering for the two men spraying blood and teeth into the air with their fists, only to make sure that Holmes came home safely afterward. That there was a certain control over his own gambling habit when it was done in favour of his colleague's defeating the brute in the arena with him. That he was here in his position as Sherlock Holmes' doctor, to tend to his injuries afterward and see him safely to bed in the clean sheets at 221b. 

Watson most certainly did _not_ revel in the Punchbowl's miasma of brutal masculinity, rank sweat, fetid heat and stale beer that would put an Army barracks to shame. It was surely a momentary lapse that caused him to whoop and yell with the other ruffians when Holmes pummelled his opponent into the sawdust. And surely coincidence only that each of those victorious nights ended with him shagging his bruised and filthy companion into the grimy ticking upstairs, blood and all. 

"Admit it." Holmes stroked him. "You like the atmospheric conditions here."

"Ballocks."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the September 2020 Watson's Woes Monthly Prompt, “atmospheric."


	10. Ghosts (Spooktacular Prompt #1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are more haunts than can be conjured by the supernatural.

He couldn't find his way back. He'd walked this way from his club to Baker Street so many times, but now it was a faceless, nameless throughway. The fog was yellow with sulfur and black with charcoal and deadly. Home was beyond this sickly street-light, this strange pavement. The few shops he could see beyond the swirling effluvia were dark-windowed, doors shuttered; there would be no friendly well-lit doorway to welcome him here. 

The thick ghastly mist coalesced into shapes, figures, people. Many people. All walked toward him. 

He knew them all. 

A young woman held out her 3-year-old girl-child in her arms, already dead. He shook his head and moved past.

A solder glared at him, wobbling on one leg; a bloodied trouser-leg flapped emptily beside it. The man's eyes were sunken, lips pulling back to show a skull's grin. 

He walked on. He passed the Irregular lad with cancer caving in his chest and face, the grandmother with a twisted ankle and blood-poisoning making her whole leg red and swollen as a balloon, the middle-aged pregnant woman with a dozen crying children clinging to her skirts. Men in uniforms slumped on the ground and covered in whining flies; children in rags coughing; Thurston writhing on the ground still holding his billiards-cue, face frozen in apoplexy. He knew them all. 

They lay round and crowded him, blocked his path and hemmed him in, his failures, lit for this masked ball by putrid yellow and gangrenous black. He couldn't see past them. They wouldn't let him go until he made them better and they were already dead, how could he help the dead? He wanted to beg their forgiveness but could not speak, words had been his salvation all his life but would not save him now. He was sorry, so sorry that he couldn't help them now. 

Then he heard a clear, sweet and terribly sad tune up ahead. 

All of them heard. They turned away from him to look in the same direction in which he was walking. 

He saw a church. It was a small house of worship with a modest spire; yellow candlelight shone from door and windows, warm and inviting and cutting through the sickly fog. From inside the little church the sad, beautiful music called them all. Though he himself was mute, the pure tones eloquently spoke for him, telling his dead of his sorrow and promising them all peace if they came forward. 

He walked unimpeded through pauper women and messmates and elderly patients. They all turned and followed behind, as silent as the graves that awaited them in the churchyard beyond. 

The sweet, grieving music welcomed him back into the light. 

# 

Sherlock Holmes laid his violin and bow down. From the upstairs bedroom he heard only the sounds of deep slumbering breath; Watson no longer whimpered or pleaded in his sleep. 

Curious, how that passage from Bach's Requiem never failed to still his friend's troubled dreams and bring ease to his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October 2020 Watson's Woes Spooktacular prompt #1, from _The Sign of Four_ : "The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,-- sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more."


	11. Outrageous (Spooktacular Prompt #2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title is a synonym for the word in question.

When most people hear that word, they think of something like a Notre Dame gargoyle leering down at the town. (For many Parisians, Gustave Eiffel's new construction can be described no other way.) Others may cite John Merrick, or his fellow unfortunates in a thousand circuses and side-shows – the oddities of human gestation.

Those are not what I think when I hear or say the word.

I have a small medical practise that consists of middle-class and respectable people, and occasionally I also venture into Camden or other such places to dispense a little medical help at the charity hospitals. 

In many places only two streets' widths separate two very different neighbourhoods – one where my patients complain that they had to purchase second-pressing Champagne rather than first-pressing because their taxes are too burdensome, and one where 12-year-old girls die of syphilis after birthing their second or third child because there is no other way to feed their siblings. 

If that is not grotesque, what is?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October 2020 Watson's Woes Spooktacular prompt #2, "How do you deﬁne the word ‘grotesque’?”


	12. Pep Talk (Spooktacular Prompt #3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it's kinder to slap a hand than hold it.

"Go back!" 

The woman before him barred his way, anger focusing her glare like a gunsight. 

He knew her. "Journeys end in lovers' meetings." Misnomer; they hadn't actually been lovers. But if ever a woman occupied his thoughts it was this brilliant thief. 

This brilliant dead thief. Which meant he too was – _the train car, so tired oh god_ Watson –

"Go back and finish your work!" Her dark eyes were full of rage. "And if you cared about me, avenge me! Go back and face him!"

Him. The hook, the pain. 

It was as if she could read his thoughts here. If anything, her look became contemptuous. "Are you going to let a little torture stop you? Pah! Men are so weak! Go complain to any woman who's given birth more than once!"

He had a job to do. He needed Watson whole and sound beside him to do this, not the shaking, weeping man battering his chest with both fists and cursing. They took care of each other. They saved each other's lives, that was the rule. He'd saved Watson once, with that electrical prong. Electricity. Whisper in his ear, _electricity_. 

"Now go!" she snapped one last time. 

He grinned over the sudden terrible jolt in his chest. "Irene, you are the worst." 

And gasped awake in the dirty boxcar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October 2020 Watson's Woes Spooktacular prompt #3, “from Gloria Scott: 'Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old lovers are the worst.'"


	13. The Details (Spooktacular Prompt #4)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson knows what real monsters look like, and it's not men in robes playing sorceror.

Magic. Mediums. The supernatural. Otherworldly powers of darkness. They are all fairy tales we tell ourselves, to make us seem less monstrous. 

Blackwood was a charlatan who used sleight-of-hand to disguise his murders and frighten the gullible in his drive for power. Just another phosphor-painted dog. 

Most people live their safe secure lives blissfully unaware of the limitless nature of human evil – their sensibilities so cushioned that when faced with such a thing cloaked in a little hocus-pocus and pig's blood, they collapse crossing themselves or throwing salt over their shoulders. 

I am a veteran of the Subcontinent who was caught up in a bloody rout of a battle, and I will be happy to attest under oath that there is no evil in the world that is beyond the imagination of mortal men. 

When you have heard your messmates make wagers on how many children they can shoot in the next town they pass (provided those children are brown-skinned, speak Pashto, and are referred to as "rats") even as those same men speak longingly of seeing their own children again in England, it's impossible to imagine that if Satan actually existed, that he could be any worse than this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October 2020 Watson's Woes Spooktacular prompt #4, from The Hound of the Baskervilles: "The devil’s agents may be of ﬂesh and blood, may they not?"


	14. Imagine Dragons (Spooktacular Prompt #5)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A physician and a writer knows how his two disciplines explain a belief in vampires.

"It's not lunacy we deal with, but natural science." 

Sherlock Holmes looked over at his companion from his own supper. "Accusing a woman of being a _vampire_ is natural science?"

One corner of Watson's moustache curled at the comment. He waved his fork for emphasis. "Natural science, a few centuries removed. All science asks one question: How do we explain the world? 

"People are wasting away and turn pale with blood on their lips. We say tuberculosis; they blamed vampires. Someone gets violently ill or dies from food others eat without harm. We say allergies; they shouted witchcraft. The ground shakes and boiling-hot melted stone erupts from the earth. We say tectonic plates; they imagined dragons. 

"They told stories about these things to teach and warn, before most people could read or write. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and they're so powerful that we still tell them today." 

The candle at the dinner table flared up for just a flicker, as if both huddled in a cave in France 30,000 years ago surrounded by paintings of aurochs and mammoths. It died down, and the sober, modern gaslight once again provided the illumination for the men's meal. 

Watson continued. "We are rational. We know vampires are fairy tales. And yet, there is the storyteller from 4000 years ago crouched in our brain, deeper than the reasoner who knows that death is biological, that consumption is caused by microbes, and that there are concrete explanations for why an infant has puncture wounds on his neck. That storyteller is trying to keep us alive by sending old information about the warning signs and the cure for such horrors." 

Holmes stared at Watson. "Rubbish." 

"Rubbish to the mind of Sherlock Holmes." Watson regarded his friend the way he looked at something interesting under his microscope. "Your brain works differently from most people. You seem comprised of pure unstoppable reason. You likely evicted that storyteller in the cradle. But you've kept one element from that ancient brain." 

Holmes nodded, a smile as if Watson had just defeated him in the Punch Bowl. "Imagination." 

"Imagination. Which your rational mind harnesses. You do not see the dragons, but you know what would make others see them. You know vampires are rubbish. But you can travel the lanes of human thought and rebuild the steps that would make a sane and rational person fear monsters from a Gothic novel." Watson spread his hands. "We find the living agents of such monstrous deeds, and bring them to justice."

Sherlock Holmes kept his eyes on Watson for just a moment longer before he returned to his kidney pie. But his shoulders were lower and his manner was easier. Watson had squared the circle of this bizarre case. "So we come wearing crosses and bearing oaken stakes, but keep an eye out for phosphor paint and mediums' tricks." 

"Exactly, my dear Van Helsing." Watson took a forkful of mashed potatoes to hide his grin at Holmes' glare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October 2020 Watson's Woes Spooktacular prompt #5, from The Sussex Vampire: "Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy."


	15. Dressing Down (November)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's do it right this time, shall we?

Holmes had been taken aback at his partner's vehemence when he'd announced his intention to infiltrate a garden party to pick up gossip that could steer him in the right direction of a disappeared Parliamentarian. 

"If you're going to dress as a woman," Watson had snapped at Holmes, "at least do it correctly this time, so you don't get mistaken for an escapee from a pantomime!" 

And "doing it correctly" apparently meant roping Watson into the business. The other Watson.

"Stocky. You'll have to be an older woman, and we'll pad you out a bit to put some curves on you." Mary cocked her head, assaying Holmes in the middle of the room in his drawers like Michelangelo eyeing a fresh chunk of marble. "That'll also provide a good excuse for a thick layer of makeup, if your looks are declining with age." 

"Might help if you shaved this time, too." Watson didn't even drop the newspaper he was reading in the corner, but his mirth was evident in his tone. 

"You might need to run and catch someone so we'll go with a corset that just holds your shape. Bustle, of course, that'll hide a good number of sins as well. Too old-fashioned for bloomers, so skirts it is." 

Layer by layer, Holmes fabricated the back story for Mrs. Barrowston while piece by piece, Mary draped his backside in fabric. Watson stayed out of the fray but remained in the room to watch the transformation. 

By midmorning the day before the party, a visiting dowager invited by the M.P.'s wife to attend the function – new in town, curious about the local gossip – was complete down to her immaculately-polished black button boots, treading on the floor with a woman's light step. "So good of you both to have me over." The voice was low and light, with a hint of a life hard-lived. 

Watson kissed the elderly woman's gloved hand. "Charmed, madame."

Mary only looked at her creation and beamed. "It's alive. It's alive!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the November 2020 Watson's Woes prompt, _bustle_.


End file.
